I was at St. Andrews, too, in 1901 and saw the finish between Harold Hilton and Johnny Low, one of the best that ever has been played. Here, too, I was the victim of the ultimate winner; and I do not know that I had any need to be beaten by him, for though Hilton won this championship, he has said himself in his memoirs that he was not playing as he should, at the time. I believe the truth to have been, as he himself suggests, that we were all a little frightened of him. I remember we started in pouring rain, and he won the first three holes off me. Then the weather improved and so did I, so that I wore off these three holes and got one up with five to play. At this fatal point I pulled my tee shot into one of those pernicious little bunkers on the Elysian Fields called the Beardies, and the final holes Hilton played more strongly than I did and won by two and one to play. It is a curious thing that the only other time of my meeting him in the amateur championship, which was at Hoylake in the year that Johnny Ball won from Aylmer in the final, the match was almost a replica of this former one. Again he won the first three holes, again I wore him down and got one up with five to play, and again I chucked away the advantage, and it looked almost sure that he would again win by two and one. But I holed a good putt at the seventeenth to save that hole. He gave me no chance of winning the last, and so again he beat me. These are the only two meetings we have had in the championship, and neither, from my point of view, is very glorious in the telling. The year 1900 was a very unhappy one in the history of golf. In that year a Boer bullet ended the life of one of the most gay and gallant-hearted fellows that ever took up a club, Freddy Tait, and incidentally took a good deal of the interest out of the golf of our generation. That year, and also the next, Johnny Ball was out at the war, and did not take part in the championship; and I think that these are actually the only two occasions since the institution of the amateur championship that he has not had a hand in it. He is very capable of taking a master hand still. I have said little of the open championship during these years, for the reason that it has never had anything like the same attraction for me, either to play in or as a spectacle, as the amateur, in which golfers are brought together in matches, and there is the clash of temperaments, the man to man contest, the one bringing out (or driving in, as the case may be) all that is best in the other. I cannot see that any scoring competition ever competes, in the human and psychological interest, with such duels as these.